The Most American Thing

Protesters in Battery Park, in Manhattan, on Sunday, speaking out against Donald Trump’s ban on refugees and travellers from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

Photograph by Radhika Chalasani / Redux

In terms of temperament, I have always been what I think of as American: adventurous, convinced of myself, contradictory. But I was born in Canada, to parents who were born in the Philippines, and, although I was in kindergarten when we moved to Texas, I didn’t become a U.S. citizen until eight years ago, in 2009. It was my last year of college, and I had applied to the Peace Corps, which requires volunteers to be citizens over the age of eighteen.

Until that point, I had been a permanent resident, like my parents. My green-card photo showed me in three-quarter profile: tanned and smiling, black hair behind a headband, four years old. From that point on, I had an American upbringing so wholesome and institutional that it borders on archetype. I lived on the outskirts of Houston, riding tiny bicycles with a posse of small blond children across barely developed pasture studded with cheap model homes. I attended a private school, through a succession of scholarships, where the mascot was a bald eagle and we pledged allegiance three times every morning: to the American flag, the Texas flag, and the Christian flag, which is a real thing. I spent Friday nights in high school with bows in my hair and a megaphone beside me, cheering for our awful football team underneath the flushed Southern sky. I won another scholarship to the University of Virginia, where I joined a sorority and did keg stands in sundresses. I waited tables on weekends, I volunteered for the National Parks Service, I was brand-loyal to Budweiser. I was American through and through.

But I had never cared much about making it official. Like many children of Asian immigrants who grow up in conservative white communities, I was brutally aware of racial discrimination, as well as the fact that I was often given some sort of arbitrary personal pass. I was deeply disturbed by the prosperity-gospel patriotism that surrounded me in Texas, the exclusions it implied for all sorts of minorities, including the poor. And so I liked my in-between status. That I didn’t have to belong to this country to give to it and to take from it wholeheartedly seemed like the most American thing in the world.

Then Barack Obama was elected President, and I felt like I’d come out from underwater—like all that lacquered rhetoric about the land of opportunity really meant something, like someone had unexpectedly reassured me that I belonged. I could feel America’s magic working on me—that sense of acceleration and unexpected possibility. I was twenty, and I suddenly wanted to be affiliated. I wanted to join the Peace Corps, with its hippie name and its old-fashioned logo, a flag that sloped and waved into an abstract peace sign, the stars on the blue turning into doves. I liked the idea of being an official representative of America: someone who immigrated, whose parents had immigrated, who had brown skin and no small amount of double consciousness, and was a part of this country as much as anyone else.

So I applied for citizenship. It was an expensive, lengthy, and difficult process, and I can’t imagine that the process is ever much easier for anyone than it was for me, as a permanent resident who was employed and educated, had no children to look after, and was comfortable enough with paperwork that I could do my taxes without a hitch. I drove back and forth to D.C., getting fingerprinted, fixing clerical errors, taking the written citizenship test. By the time I sat down for my final oral interview, I had spent hours whiling away time in waiting rooms with families who had put so much more on the table. I had become a little obsessed with the immigrant’s relationship to America—how you generally love something more when you’ve had to work for it, how seeing the holes in a country’s grand narrative of inclusion can make a person want to stitch that narrative up.

I was sworn in on March 20, 2009, in a courthouse in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had a terrible hangover and got very emotional. It’s at a citizenship ceremony where you see what America really means, more so than at any football game or church or National Park, any crowded city or suburban lawn. In a citizenship ceremony, you see this country’s first and only center, its promise of freedom and opportunity, which it has often issued with extreme dishonesty—and a group of people who want to accept that promise anyway. A woman named Natalya with a Russian accent stood up at the end of the ceremony and gave an ad-hoc speech about feeling American, how she felt that she had something powerful in common with everyone in the room. I don’t often feel unabashedly patriotic, but in front of Natalya? I jumped to my feet, with everyone else, and applauded.

I have felt patriotic again in the days since Donald Trump’s Inauguration, in those moments when millions of Americans have exposed their civic conscience and gone to protest in the streets. The overwhelming aura in these demonstrations is one of love, the kind that really matters—the kind that can see something appalling and refuse to turn away. Since Trump issued his shockingly cruel executive order on Friday, forbidding entry into the United States to refugees from anywhere in the world and immigrants from a set of majority Muslim countries, the rhetoric that has abounded in clogged airports and public spaces all over the country has been the rhetoric of solidarity and inclusion, of not wanting to repeat history’s mistakes.

Trump’s executive order has been challenged by lawyers, stayed by judges, disowned by State Department employees, and protested by a coalition whose anger and energy lawmakers would be wise not to ignore. Nonetheless, its toll has been immediate and grievous. Families have been broken up indefinitely, caregivers kept from their sick parents and children. People who endangered themselves to work for our military have been denied our protection. Refugees have been returned to what you might fairly call a death sentence. Foreign-born students have been advised that reëntry might not be possible if they leave the country. Plans that have taken decades of sacrifice have been derailed in an instant.

One of the things I have found so moving about the intense public pushback to these tragedies is the readiness with which America’s central mythology has come back into hand. At the Battery Park protest this past weekend, the signs expressed identification with the people detained and turned away. Immigrants make America great, the posters said. We are all immigrants. Jesus was a refugee; the pilgrims were refugees. There was a sense in the air not just that we were all equals but that our origin stories were in some way arbitrary, even interchangeable. They aren’t, of course—not everyone came to this country voluntarily—but this stance is useful. We would do well to remember that we did nothing to determine the circumstances of our birth. Even within the small story of my family it feels like chance that I wasn’t born in Texas, like my little brother, or in the Philippines, like my parents. It’s only luck that the longstanding quotas on Asian immigration were lifted in 1965, two decades before my parents decided to move.

For the most part, I have experienced America as the place it believes itself to be. I wasn’t born here. But while I have lived here people have been good to me, institutions have trusted that I would make something of their resources, and, above all, public policy has been generous at precisely the moments it determined my path. This remains a narrow, remarkable experience. It’s only chance that any of us—walking down a street, or through airport security—are ever spared the arbitrary, corrosive spotlight that comes from being born into whichever population the white American power structure has lately decided that it should fear.

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her first book, the essay collection “Trick Mirror,” will be published in August.